For days I cannot breathe. My chest burns, my throat closes. We wander like madmen, deranged, waiting for the blow, for the command that will tear us away again. We have known war, yes, two endless years of it, gnawing at us like rats gnaw at the bones of a corpse, but thisโฆ this is worse, infinitely worse. They tell us to leave. Again. For the fifth time. Do you hear? The fifth! And this time, O God, this time, we know it is the last. The last. We will not return. Never. Not tomorrow, not in ten years, not even in the fading memories of our children.
The door I shut behind me now will never open again to my hand. That sound, wood against wood, is not a door closing. It is my soul being nailed into its coffin. I am alive, yet I am already buried.
And what is this exile? It is not a journey, no! It is the stripping out of the last trembling thread of the human soul. They do not want men, or women, or children. They want shadows. Shadows crawling over dust, faceless, nameless, memoryless. A people of tents! Yes, tents! A nation whose destiny is canvas and rope, whose highest ambition is a rag flapping in the wind. Lord, is this not a death more merciless than the grave? To leave a man breathing, but rob him of all that makes him man, to condemn him to walk as a ghost who cannot even die.
The city, our city, beloved, betrayed, will be erased, levelled, spat into dust. Its stones scattered like ash in the wind. The houses where children quarreled, where mothers sang, where bread rose warm from the oven, all gone, gone forever. And then, O merciful God, we will forget. Yes, we will forget! In the torment of thirst, clawing for one drop of water, we will forget our streets, our walls, our keys, our doors. We will forget the warmth of winter, the sting of summer nights. We will forget neighbors, quarrels, weddings, songs. We will forget even that we were human.
Tell me, Lord, how can man forget himself? How can memory be ripped from the soul like flesh from bone? Remember us! Remember us before the breaking is complete. Remember the eyes of the children before their light is extinguished. Remember the tears of the mothers, the same as your mothersโ tears. Remember that we screamed, that we did not fall silent, that we tried with the last shreds of our strength.
And look, look with horror, at the abyss of history: how those who once wept in ghettos, who staggered through camps, who suffocated in ovens, now see their leaders prepare our exile. Auschwitz, do you hear its echo? It has not ended. It returns, it mutates, it reappears in new masks. And now the victim wears the face of the executioner. This is the most infernal blasphemy: that those scarred by the Holocaust now see their leaders fashion a Holocaust anew.
Write our names, I beg you, I cry to you, on your walls, in your books, in your prayers. Carve them into stone, before they vanish into dust. For tomorrow even you will doubt we ever walked the earth. And when your children ask: were they ever a people? Did they breathe? Did they love? Were they human? What will you answer then, when your own memory betrays you?
And Gaza, my Gaza, is ending. Yes, ending. This is the fifth exile, and the last. The last! An end blacker than the blackest pages of history, darker than the darkest prophecies ever dared to imagine. And yet, even as I write, through tears that blind me, something remains. A silence. A silence heavier than stone, heavier than tombs, heavier even than Godโs gaze. A silence that devours the cry itself, that roars louder than all screams combined. That silence will not die. It will haunt you. It will haunt the world. It will haunt God Himself.
#GazaGenocide
